Friday, 9 June 2017

The Great Crested Grebes nesting on the fallen poplar in the Long Water have their first chick. This picture was taken from across the lake, the only possible viewpoint.

Newly hatched chicks have stripes all over, but the ones on their body are soon covered with grey down, so only their head and neck remain stripy.

The Coots nesting on the platform in the small boathouse lost all their chicks, as always happens when they fall off the platform and can't get back up. Now they have started again, and there will be another doomed brood. This boathouse is inaccessible to the people at Bluebird Boats, who try to be kind to birds, so they can't put in a plank.

A Coot on the Long Water was mildly surprised when a carp swam under it.

The combined broods of Canada Geese were cruising on the Serpentine.

Here is a video of the Greylags' nursery, with two broods. Another Canada family is grazing in the background.

The Mute Swan family on the Long Water came over to Peter Pan to tout for food. A dog passed by on the shore, and the female swan hissed angrily at it.

A pair of Gadwalls were also there. Unlike Mallards, they are not interested in being fed by humans, and tend to keep their distance. The female stood up and had a flap.

The young Grey Heron is almost always in the same place on the edge of the island. It can be seen poking up above the plants, looking foolish as young herons do.

The female Grey Wagtail from the nest in the Dell was hunting on the rafts.

A young Great Tit beside the Long Water was making it very clear that it wanted to be fed.

So was the white-faced Blackbird. Here she is taking sultanas off the railings.

The female Little Owl at the leaf yard looked down serenely from her nest hole.

Paul found a very small bumblebee on the path near Peter Pan, and put it on a bramble flower. After it had recovered from its surprise, it started looking for nectar.

It looked like a Buff-Tailed Bumblebee, the commonest species in the park, but it was only two-thirds of their normal size.

About Me

I have been coming to the park for more than 60 years, and watching and feeding the birds. I am not an expert birder, but I know and love the park.
My main camera is a Pentax K-1 with a Pentax DFA 150-450mm zoom lens. At 7lb it is just light enough to carry for several hours. I also carry a Nikon Coolpix P900 for video and near shots where depth of field is required, and for very long shots where its enormous 83x zoom (equal to a 2000mm lens) is more important than a high-quality image.

This list is of all the birds, including rare visitors, that have been seen in the park since 1889. Sources include W.H. Hudson, 1898 (the naturalist in whose memory the Rima memorial was built); A.H. Macpherson, 1929; and various publications of the London Natural History Society (LNHS) from 1935 to 1993, with an appendix added by Roy Sanderson in 1995 to bring the total to 177 species. Since then it has been updated from LNHS bird reports, many of these from observations by Des McKenzie, who wrote the predecessor of this blog.